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On a rainy day in late July in Addis Ababa, I met Sister Yamileth Bolaños. Originally from Costa Rica, Sister Yamileth has spent many years working in Ethiopia with the Comboni Missionary Sisters. She dedicates most of her time to the charity’s work to fight human trafficking and to help vulnerable women and girls who have been trafficked or sexually abused.
Tragically, there are all too many women in Ethiopia who have been victims of these crimes. One of the big drivers, Sister Yamileth told me, is the huge demand for domestic workers in rich Gulf countries, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which draws thousands of women every year from poor countries such as Ethiopia.
Though many of these women travel abroad legally, they often face horrific exploitation upon their arrival, with employers confiscating their passports and forcing them to work in the most inhumane conditions. Sister Yamileth told me the story of one young woman who was essentially locked in a tiny kitchen 24 hours a day by her employer in Dubai, and who suffered burns on 95% of her body after a fire broke out as she was cooking one day.
In many cases, these victims are repatriated to Ethiopia with the help of the government, yet they often return home with nothing. The Comboni Sisters take some of these women in, hosting them at their convent for a few months and providing vocational training as well as psychosocial support to try to help them get back on their feet and reintegrate into society.
Sister Yamileth remembers going to pick up the first woman they helped from the airport a couple of years ago. She drove there in a large car, she recalls, to accommodate the woman’s luggage, but in the end, she was shocked to find the young woman standing there with a single plastic bag. Inside were two crumpled dresses. They were all that she owned in the world.
Sister Yamileth told me that the work they do to help these women is vitally important, but a drop in the ocean. Tens of thousands of people are human trafficked in Ethiopia every year, and efforts to combat this scourge have been complicated this year by drastic cuts to foreign aid budgets by the United States and other rich countries.
I have never seen so much suffering in one place, Sister Yamileth said to me in July. On current trends, things look set to get worse.
Read more about the fallout of foreign aid cuts to trafficking-prevention programs in Ethiopia in “The Fallout,” in the September issue of ONE.